[giraffe_lady]

In a taxonomy of religious belief the communion of saints is much closer to ancestor veneration than it is polytheism. If you're going to see anything in christianity as potentially polytheistic it's the triune god come on.

[petsfed]

I think, in a technical sense, you're right. But the difference between ancestor veneration (especially semi-legendary ancestor veneration) and veneration of a pantheon of lower-tier dieties is practically nonexistent. Its a distinction without difference.

Nobody hesitates to call Shintoism polytheistic, and its core practices, to an outsider, seem strikingly similar to how a Christian, especially a Roman Catholic, interacts with the saints.

[giraffe_lady]

I don't disagree really. I do think there are in-this-context significant differences between how individual saints are interacted with. A personal or family patron saint tends much more towards looking like ancestor veneration, compared to eg mary who in practice takes a role that would in other religions be filled by a deity of femininity/motherhood/nurturing/etc.

But overall in any case I think it's sometimes valuable to think of christianity this way and sometimes not. It is a syncretic religion so of course it has regional variations and contradictory remnants of absorbed practices. IIRC some of the specific saint traditions, like icons in the home, predate christianity in the mediterranean.

But on the other hand there are practices and relationships common in true polytheistic religions that you don't see in christianity at all. If taking the saints as minor deities, you don't find sects exalting one of them exclusively, nor do you see individual christians "defect" from one saint to another for personal advantage. There's no theology of competition or opposition between the saints to base such practices on at all. So there are limits to the usefulness of this perspective too.

The shintoism example is interesting, I'll need to look more into it. I had considered it polytheistic but now that I think about it I haven't read shinto writings on the subject so I don't know if most shinto practitioners experience it that way. Outside perspectives aren't completely invalid of course but they aren't as interesting to me as how believers experience their own religions.

[NemoNobody]

God is in 3 parts that comprise a whole in their sum.

Legislative, Executive, Judicial = Govt of US Strike 1, 2 and 3 = an out Mind, Body, soul = A person

I could list hundreds of these examples.

3=1 is a rule found all over reality. The easiest way to create something that will exist for awhile, as it has a sound foundation, is build the foundation in 3 parts that make the whole.

Almost all dichotomies have a hidden third aspect. The fight is over how obvious it was at the time - the church was scared people may discover the secret way to create like the divine, so they convoluted it until they couldn't understand it uniformly anymore.